Italian football and its tale of woe

More than being a surprise, Italy’s failure to qualify for the 2018 Football World Cup can be described as the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Even the most sanguine Italian soccer fan was aware that the Italian national team had long lost its competitive edge and sooner or later was destined to bite the dust.

Without
the heroes of the past decades, all that was left was a squad of ordinary
players drawn from the ever-decreasing Italian members of the major Serie A
football clubs. Players of the likes of Rossi,Tardelli, Altobelli, Baggio, Pirlo,
Totti, Cannavaro, Del Piero - just to mention a few champions of yesteryear –
have gone down into history leaving a vacuum that has remained unfilled.

Yet
despairing Italian fans in Italy, Australia and elsewhere can get some
consolation from the experience of other great footballing nations. Having
failed to reach the 1990 World Cup, France endured the worst qualification
meltdown in history four years later. Needing just a single draw from two
remaining home games, France lost first to 51st-ranked Israel and then to
24th-placed Bulgaria. That too seemed like an apocalypse: “Unspeakable!”
thundered L'Équipe. “Rocked by
scandals and cowardice, undermined by crooks and buried under mounds of money,
football is being dragged into disgrace,” remonstrated France-Soir describing the shameful state of French
football. France hosted the next tournament in 1998, showing up with a squad of
young, attack-minded players, many of them sons of immigrants. They won the
championship, thrashing Brazil 3-0 in the final.

But
Italy is different. The Azzurri have
always found a way, even in the worst of circumstances. Italy went into the
2006 World Cup with a match-fixing scandal raging back home and it ended up
lifting the trophy. Another scandal erupted ahead of the 2012 European
Championship, but Italy emerged a worthy runner-up to Spain. Four years later,
Italy went in with arguably its weakest squad ever but still outwitted reigning
champion Spain and lost to Germany in the quarter-finals only on penalties.

This
is what makes the four-time champion missing out on the World Cup, for the
first time in sixty years, astounding. It is true that the qualification
process left very little margin for error, with only the group topper earning a
direct entry. Clubbed alongside Spain, Italy was always expected to come second
and be in the playoff. Once there, it was unlucky to draw Sweden, the toughest
of opponents. But even so, its performances have been repeatedly poor. In
recent times Italy has even registered draws against novices such as Haiti and
Luxembourg. There is such a dearth of emerging talent that in the first leg
against Sweden, seven of Italy’s starting 11 were older than 30.

A
lot of blame is placed on the now disgraced coach Giampiero Ventura. He ignored
players who were adept and schooled in modern-day tactical methods. Midfielder
Jorginho, who has been excellent for Napoli, was only handed his debut against
Sweden while forward Lorenzo Insigne, the most creative of the lot, was kept on
the bench. Nonetheless, whomever had be chosen to play, everybody knew that Italy’s
team had become the shadow of its former self.

That
said, one could add that Italy is not the only nation licking its wounds.